School’s Out! #3 with Lesley Lokko

Lesley Lokko was the speaker of School’s Out! #3! During here talk ‘Look Back in Anger’, Lesley Lokko followed the setting up of the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA), currently Africa’s largest and only postgraduate school of architecture at the University of Johannesburg, following the student protests of 2015 and 2016 which effectively shut down tertiary education in the country for several weeks. Adopting Alvin Boyarsky’s famed ‘unit system’ pedagogy, over the past five years, Unit System Africa at the GSA has empowered a new generation of young African architects to imagine new and radically different possibilities for architecture and urban cultures through a combination of avant-garde, speculative and multi-disciplinary perspectives. This talk was focused on the productive use of anger as a catalyst for radical and imaginative change, crucial in the context of a continent attempting to redefine its place in global built environment discourses. The presentation was accompanied by a number of videos which showcased the wide-ranging influences and outcomes that this exciting and transformational experiment in architectural education has produced.

Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic and the author of ten best-selling novels. She lives almost simultaneously in Johannesburg, London, Accra and Edinburgh, and is currently Head of School at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Lokko was trained as an architect at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and gained her PhD from the University of London. She is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture; editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture and is on the editorial board of ARQ (Cambridge). Lokko has been an on-going contributor to discourses around identity, race, African urbanism and the speculative nature of African architectural space and practice for nearly thirty years

Programme

18.00 – 19:00 Drinks, food, and tunes
19.00 – 19:45 Talk ‘Look Back in Anger’ by Lesley Lokko + Q&A
19.45 – 20:00 Film selected by Jord den Hollander
20:00 – 22.00 Drinks, food, and tunes